


Clearing the Books (A Short Fic)

by Pastafarian



Category: A Practical Guide to Evil - erraticerrata
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:20:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21665818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pastafarian/pseuds/Pastafarian
Summary: Robber reminisces over a fight as he tabulates the betting results.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	Clearing the Books (A Short Fic)

Even at a hundred to one, there hadn’t been any takers on the main event. Well, obviously; the Boss was the Boss, and this was a bag of chump change on a scummy river, floating until it broke the surface.

Still, it’d primed the pump, gotten people laughing. And even if nobody’d taken a bet that someone would go down, there was always the open pool on how many hits the Boss would take and walk off without more than half noticing. Break-even on the odds was four; by Borer’s count, which everyone trusted - he didn’t even have a copper in the pool - the Boss had only taken two hits worth counting.

_ The Relentless Monk’s fist struck her with enough force to send her flying and shatter her rib cage, but Catherine Foundling’s body was a convenience, and Robber’s eyes narrowed as he tracked the arc of her flight. She would intersect some spell on the way down, he’d bet his collection of eyes - and the Boss knew it, too. She kicked off of a plane of ice that hadn’t been there before, hissed in irritation, and rocketed off towards the third Hero. This, Robber thought to himself, was going to get good. _

That was half of the main action. Hakram had swept the other half with two kills to Catherine’s zero, upsetting the entire board; Indrani had gone par, but she’d done it with style, and he’d had his own bets riding on the trick she’d pulled. Most of the side bets in the pool hadn’t panned out one way or the other, but he’d managed to inveigle a counter-bid at twenty-to-one from Clipper, which she’d taken as flirtation.

Well, she hadn’t been entirely wrong. But now she was not entirely wrong, and out a fair amount of gold.

_ She was clad in now-dented full plate, but she  _ moved _ , just at the last possible moment and the least necessary amount. Her sword opened the Monk’s arm wrist to elbow, and she pivoted to charge the Silent Priestess. She swung once, twice into that sapphire bubble of frozen air before a burst of light sent her flying sideways, jaw locked and lightning crackling across her armor. She never hit the ground; instead, she slammed into Hakram, who lightly tossed her up onto her feet as he broke the Monk’s wrist, expression never changing, and followed up with the shoulder and then a half second later the neck, and the slash across his arm stopped healing as he fell to the ground. _

The odds against the use of goblinfire had been too high for many people to put money on, seven to one against, but a couple of optimistic Goblins and three pessimistic Taghreb Legionnaires had taken the wrong side of it. Idiots. Median was bang-on with the figured collateral damages, which meant less money for the house. And about fifty-fifty on whether Catherine would use one of the Heroes as a club; he won that one either way.

_ With the Monk dead, it should have been straightforward work on cleanup. Which obviously meant a new Aspect or two coming out of the ones they were fighting; the Priestess’s  _ **_Radiate_ ** _ had been baited out earlier as a reset and while the Crimson Sentinel’s  _ **_Brand_ ** _ had hurt she’d more or less managed to shrug it off, courtesy of plenty of experience with angels trying to do similar things. His  _ **_Hold_ ** _ she’d chosen to  _ **_Break_ ** _ when it’d come to it, and the backlash had put him on the back foot enough for Hakram to put an axe through his robes. _

He needed to make sure the Boss didn’t find out about this one, though. She took fights like these seriously; she wouldn’t have appreciated the setup. Gods, he didn’t appreciate it either; if he hadn’t realized what was going on early enough, he might have put his own money down on the short end of the stick like so many did.

_ The brightstick went off in front of the Priestess’s face, tossed from just behind her. Her mouth opened in a wordless scream, showing off her flat cow teeth and the lack of a tongue between them. Some sort of Aspect was about to land, Robber figured, but since Hakram still had both of his kicking around and Indrani… where the hell was - _

_ “- I didn’t throw that one! Fuck off!” _

_ Indrani took another pull from her wineskin, kicking Rattler’s ankle. Moving fluidly, she struck, and all was quiet on the battlefield. _

Really, though. Fifty-to-one odds, he’d calculated after the bets were finalized. Fifty-to-one odds, and only one other person on the long side of the bet, though the bets had been placed through intermediaries.

Indrani would drink the entire fight. Indrani would steal at least one thing and use it as a weapon. Indrani would put an arrow through one of the heroes’ eyes.

Really, though. This was the Archer, and pity the fool who took the other side of a bet from her; she’d saunter through a fight and stab a moron with an arrow to win a bet.

_ Villains.  _ Robber grinned, and finished writing up the results. Business was good, and life was good.


End file.
